With the recent scandals in the financial sector, electronic records and communications have become a prominent concern in this industry.

The Challenges

Compliance and eDiscovery The financial service sector is heavily regulated: both the NASD and the SEC have implemented regulations enforcing the retention of all inbound, outbound and internal electronic communications, including emails and instant messages. Publicly traded companies must also comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires electronic communication records to be retained in a non-tamperable format for as long as seven years as part of internal controls. Compliance also requires immediate access to these records, which include emails, attachments, and instant messages. You can read more about compliance regulations and our compliance features.

What Can Our Archiving Solutions Do?IT policies are an important aspect of compliance. Once data management best practices and email use policies are established, technology can supply part of the finance and banking industries’ compliance requirements in the form of an automated email and file archive, in the form of Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive. Archiving email, attachments, calendar files, instant messages, and other electronic data to a secure repository ensures compliance, which ensures investors and customers feel secure and keeps organizations from facing multi-million dollar fines and the accompanying negative exposure.

Facilitate ComplianceMessageSolution Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive can securely store all an organization’s electronic communications and files for an unlimited amount of time. Once installed, the archiving product automates your retention policy to implement internal controls. Granular retention policy settings allow the archive administrator to set policies for entire locations or departments, or apply a different policy to every user. Set the archive’s filtering criteria to avoid clogging the archive with personal or junk mail. However, to ensure total email compliance, it is recommended that you enable the archive’s real-time or journal archiving feature, which captures all inbound, outbound, and internal messages as soon as they hit the mail server. This ensures that no emails are ever accidentally deleted before they can be archived.

Speaking of the delete function, by default, no archive users except the administrator have the ability to delete data from the archive. Just like the retention policy settings, however, the archive administrator can customize users’ archive access capabilities down to the individual user level. For example, a manager can be given permission to search and restore his or her supervisees’ archived emails. Enterprise Email Archive maintains a log of all archiving processes, along with all users’ search and retrieval activities. The archive will alert the administrator with an email if employees attempt to violate policy. By regulating internal auditing and providing HR support, Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive minimize the occurrence of fraudulent activities. Read more about Enterprise Email Archive’s compliance features.

Ease the eDiscovery ProcessWhen requests for records pile in, turn to Enterprise Email Archive and Enterprise File Archive to locate and restore critical data long before deadlines. Superior indexing technology and an organized back end structure allows the archive to search through millions of unstructured messages or files to retrieve results within seconds. Although the search function is easy to use, it is by no means simplistic. Users can search by message or file content using full text key words, key phrases, and fuzzy search. However, users have the option of searching by message metadata, such as file type, date, sender, recipient(s), file size, and more. If the results are too broad, users can search within the results to pare down to exactly what you need.

If the archive administrator gives the legal team permission to search the archive, they can start searching immediately, no “archive classes” required, thanks to the archive’s intuitive interface. MessageSolution’s archiving products are consistently complimented for their ease of use; the graphical user interface has a flat navigational scheme, with no pop-up windows, no technical jargon, and well-labeled search criteria. If employees can perform a Google search, they can search their archive. Organizations that opt for the Suite version of Enterprise Email Archive will even be able to search the email archive directly from their email client or even from offline. View the complete list of all the email clients Enterprise Email Archive supports.

Archive users can save their searches to “Search Baskets” for later perusal, or to share with others. The archive even stores a “Top Ten” list of a user’s most common searches, which makes it quick and easy to conduct multiple searches with the same terms. Just click ‘Restore’ to return data to its original format on the email or file server for auditing and litigation purposes. Authorized users can even print and email results from the archive. Read more about the features in MessageSolution eDiscovery Suite.